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Tuesday, June 30, 2015

No, Biblical Marriage Not Between 1 Man, 1 Woman

he freak-out by the Republican presidential candidates
over the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage provokes me to
revise and reprise the points below. Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee
have formally pledged: “We will not honor any decision by the Supreme
Court which will force us to violate a clear biblical understanding of
marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman.” Sen. Ted Cruz
also called on Americans to ignore the SCOTUS ruling.

Does that mean the rest of us can repudiate the
decision making W. president in 2000, and can refuse to recognize
corporations as persons?

In any case, the Bible doesn’t actually say anything
at all about homosexuality, since it is a form of identity that only
came into being in modernity. (Same-sex intimacy has been there all
along, but in most premodern societies it was not a subculture, though
medieval male bortherhoods were common and in South Asia there were
hijras).

But wackiest of all is the idea that the Bible sees
marriage as between one man and one woman. I don’t personally get how
you could, like, actually read the Bible and come to that conclusion
(see below). Even if you wanted to argue that the New Testament
abrogates all the laws in the Hebrew Bible, there isn’t anything in the
NT that clearly forbids polygamy, either, and it was sometimes practiced in the early church,
including by priests. Josephus makes it clear that polygamy was still
practiced among the Jews of Jesus’ time. Any attempt to shoe-horn stray
statements in the New Testament about a man and a woman being married
into a commandment of monogamy is anachronistic. Likely it was the
Roman Empire that established Christian monogamy as a norm over the
centuries. The Church was not even allowed to marry people until well
after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, since it was an imperial
prerogative.

Ancient scripture can be a source of higher values and
spiritual strength, but any time you in a literal-minded way impose
specific legal behavior because of it, you’re committing anachronism.
Since this is the case, fundamentalists are always highly selective,
trying to impose parts of the scripture on us but conveniently ignoring
the parts even they can’t stomach as modern persons.

1. In Exodus 21:10 it is clearly written of the
husband: “If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the
food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife.” This is the same
rule as the Qur’an in Islam, that another wife can only be taken if the
two are treated equally.

2. Let’s take Solomon, who maintained 300 concubines
or sex slaves. 1 Kings 11:3: “He had seven hundred wives of royal birth
and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray.” Led him
astray! That’s all the Bible minded about this situation? Abducting
300 people and keeping them immured for sex? And the objection is only
that they had a lot of diverse religions and interested Solomon in them?
(By the way, this is proof that he wasn’t Jewish but just a legendary
Canaanite polytheist). I think a settled gay marriage is rather
healthier than imprisoning 300 people in your house to have sex with at
your whim.

3. Not only does the Bible authorize slavery and human
trafficking, but it urges slaves to “submit themselves” to their
masters. It should be remembered that masters had sexual rights over
their property assuming the slave-woman was not betrothed to another,
and so this advice is intended for concubines as well as other slaves.
And, the Bible even suggests that slaves quietly accept sadism and
cruelty from their masters: 1 Peter 2:18: “Slaves, submit yourselves to
your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also
to the cruel.” So a nice gay marriage between two legal equals with no
acts of cruelty would be much better than this biblical nightmare.

4. Then there is Abraham, who made a sex slave of his
wife’s slave, the Egyptian girl Hagar, and then abandoned her to cruel
treatment.

Genesis 16:1-6:

“Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But
she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, “The Lord
has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I
can build a family through her.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So
after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her
Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He
slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant,
she began to despise her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are
responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms,
and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord
judge between you and me.” 6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said.
“Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so
she fled from her.

So let’s get this straight. Abraham isn’t said to
have married Hagar. Apparently he and Sarah had separate property,
because Hagar remains her slave. So he slept with someone else’s slave
and got her pregnant. And then when that caused trouble between his
wife and her slave, he washed his hands of his property-lover and let
his wife mistreat her. As we know from 1 Peter, Hagar was supposed
graciously to put up with this, but she was made of fiercer stuff than
that, and you really have to root for her in this rather sick family
situation.

5. According Mark 12:19, guys, if your brother kicks the bucket, you have
to marry your sister-in-law and knock her up. Since the Bible approved
of multiple wives, you have to do this even if you’re already married.
If you think in-laws are hard to get along with now, try being married
to them.

6. So I don’t think this happens very much, but guys,
in biblical marriage you might have to cut your wife’s hand off if she
defends you too vigorously. That’s right. Say you’re at a bar and this
big bald badass with tats starts smashing your face in. And say your
wife likes you and wants to stop the guy from giving you a concussion.
Say she reaches down and gets him by the balls. So the Bible would
reward her for loyalty and bravery and fast thinking, right?

Nope. Now you have to cut off her hand. I mean have to. You’re not allowed to have a moment of weakness and think about how pretty her fingers are. Off with it, to the wrist GOP, you think I’m making this up, right?

Deuteronomy 25:11-12: “11 If two men are fighting and the
wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and
she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, 12 you shall cut
off her hand. Show her no pity.”

I’m not sure exactly what kind of weird marriage
Deuteronomy is recommending, where certain actions taken by they wife to
keep herself from being turned into a widow are punished by her husband
by chopping off her hand.

7. The Bible doesn’t even approve of marriage at all!
1 Corinthians 7:8 “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is
well for them to remain single as I do.” So contrary to the GOP’s
notion that the Bible authorizes only a single kind of marriage, of
which it approves, actually it much prefers believers to die out in a
single generation. Only the weak and unbiblical get married.

So this is the real problem. People like Huckabee and
Cruz shouldn’t be married in the first place, much less holding up some
imaginary ideal of biblical marriage for everybody. And if all the
biblical literalists would just obey 1 Corinthians, the whole problem
would be over with in just a generation. Then the rest of us could get
some peace and make rational policy on social issues.And as for getting married biblically, you can do that
in all kinds of imaginative ways– take two wives and someone else’s sex
slave as Abraham did, or 300 sex slaves as Solomon did (not to mention
the 700 wives), or your brother’s widow in addition to your own wife.
And remember, if your sex slave runs away because you’re cruel to the
person, the Bible (Philemon) says that other people have the duty to
return the slave to you, i.e. basically imposes the duty of trafficking
slaves back to sadistic sex maniacs who exploit them. But if the owner
is nice and a good Christian, he might consider letting the sex slave
go. But he doesn’t have to.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

All the officials around the country who are refusing to obey the Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage are committing two sins at once. They are refusing to follow the U.S. constitution AND according to St. Paul they are bound as Christians to obey civil law.Pseudo Christians only want to select certain passages of scripture to justify their views. They claim the entire Bible is the infallible and literal word of God, but easily ignore a vast amount of actual scripture. Jesus called them hypocrites.

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